The high school I attended had a pretty large Asian population (Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese) and one thing I learned early on was that you could really get a Korean kid mad at you if you called him Japanese. No love lost there, I can assure you!
Often people are really touchy about being lumped into a group they don't identify with even if they have nothing really against the other nationality.
I had this French Professor who managed to anger just about everyone in the entire class on the first day. He took the first half hour of class to lecture us Americans on how disrespectful we were of other cultures. That we were a bunch of miscreants and how superior France and the African countries were to us. That we all didn't take anything seriously. Which I'm sure is true for everyone at some point in their lives. He spoke spoke French Fluently and was from West Africa which explained why he favored those countries. It gets much worse from here. I still can't believe a university hired this professor.
During class he went over other customs from other countries and mentioned bowing as a respectful thing the Chinese do on a regular basis. So the professor called on an Asian student in class and to prove he was right. The student disagreed and said the custom that he was describing was a Japanese custom. The professor shrugs and says who really cares Japanese and Chinese are all the same thing. That student had the most disgusted face I had ever seen but kept quiet.
The professor said similar things to everyone in class who had a unique name including me. He made fun of a lot of our names and the cultures he thought we came from during the last part of class. Half of the students never came back but that was also due to him yelling at some students for not getting the pronunciations of French vocabulary right on our first try.
"You see, the boy was from Taiwan."
Oops! Well, it could have been worse. You could have mistaken a Japanese student for Korean, and then the sh*t would have hit the fan.
Commenting by HaloScan
